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FIELD LETTER #2 FROM FIJI TERM ABROAD
October 1, 1997
written by Steve Leavitt
Topics
- Students' Adjustments
- Our Recreation Flop
- Hike to "the Rock" of Vitawa
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STUDENTS' ADJUSTMENTS
Things are going generally well for the students. They have now been in their villages nearly a month and they are getting started on their independent projects. So far no one (not even Jeffrey) has gotten sick, though everyone has had some sort of minor ailment, the most common being stomach upset. It seems that the water system is not entirely clean, so we have been boiling our water, but those confounded yaqona ceremonies mean that everyone at some point is obliged to drink water straight from the tap, and that seems to produce a few days' intestinal trouble. Still, overall, we're counting our blessings regarding health.
The students seem well adjusted to the minor inconveniences regarding showers, toilets, etc. Not one of them has an inside bathroom in their host houses, but all have bathrooms they're free to use nearby. Sarah's family will likely have their new bathroom finished just in time for her departure. So it goes.
I am feeling better about Sarah's host father--he seems to genuinely enjoy having her, and it could well be that the bill he presented me is just an "advance" on the second payment I'll be making later. That's certainly how I plan to treat it. That way we'll keep some parity among the host family payments. I haven't actually discussed it with Cakacaka, but I am confident he'll see my point of view. Sarah's host parents are both already gearing up for a visit from Sarah's real parents at the end of October. They'll mostly be staying at a resort nearby, but the whole village is planning a huge feast for them, and they'll certainly get a taste of yaqona as well.
Each student has come up with a good independent project, and I am glad that two of the three have taken on something related directly to education. This will help with our relations in the Ministry of Education, our de facto sponsors here.
Sarah has decided to interview students and teachers at the local high schools about students' educational aspirations. She's interested in just to what extent they think of their education as a path toward a career, and she wonders to what extent they hope to continue on to university (not too many actually get to that point). I suggested that she compare the two high schools near here, since one is mainly Indian and the other is mostly Fijian. I am looking forward to seeing her results. She had been told by Mr. Cakacaka (and seconded by me) that she has to leave a copy of her paper with him and that she should expect to send a copy to the Ministry of Education in Suva as well. We are thinking that we may ask the students to present their work in person as well, if we can fit in another trip to Suva before they depart.
Debbie, for her part, is interested in attitudes about special education, and I suggested she do a mini-ethnography of the very small school in town here for children with disabilities (referred to locally as "the school for cripples"). They seem to enroll both students with physical handicaps and those with mental conditions of one sort or another. I thought that having her focus on the place as well as the attitudes would give her some grounding. She will also be interviewing teachers at one of the local high schools to find out to what extent they look for children with potential learning problems, etc.
Amber is doing a project on local views of romance, focusing particularly on how the more "modern" teenagers are managing this issue given some of the more "traditional" views of their parents. She was struck by a couple of things originally. One was that the students seem to write these extremely ornate love letters to each other as a matter of course (this seems in fact to be a central feature of a high school romance). Amber could not believe that they were actually composing some of these letters themselves, so she has taken it upon herself to get to the bottom of this, as it certainly would be interesting if the kids think "love letters" an essential part of a romance, no matter if the words are taken from popular songs or Shakespeare or wherever. The other thing Amber was struck by was how early in a relationship the kids think of marriage. She talked to a couple of girls who said that if there was a guy who was "good-looking" and seemed pleasant enough, she'd marry him if the situation arose. Amber wondered if this was a holdover from the days when arranged marriages were the expected thing, and she wanted to look into the topic of a "love" marriage vs. an "arranged" one.
I suggested she also look into some existing marriages, to see if there is any feeling that things turn out badly if one marries by arrangement or vice versa. The topic is a bit unwieldy, and she'll be having to do personal interviews which may or may not work out, but this is the kind of thing I myself am interested in, so it should be fun.
When we met for our weekly meeting last week, Amber announced to us all that she had had a "terrible" experience with an economics interview, and we all began thinking that maybe some people were very self-conscious about talking about their money in spite of what we've been told. But that turned out not to be it at all. Instead, she was interviewing a woman about her finances, and when she got to the point where she was asking about whether there were "tensions" in the family over money, the woman suddenly burst out in tears and could not stop. She told Amber all about her terrible marriage, how she had been abused physically and mentally by her husband, that she had been in a terrible bind with it, etc. etc. She then went on and on, unburdening herself to Amber, talking for over an hour.
Amber reported feeling disturbed by this, so much so that she stopped doing her economic interviews. She was of course disturbed by a very disturbing story of abuse, But she also seemed to be thinking that this was a very bad turn of events, that she herself was somehow responsible, and she felt simply awful about having gotten some of all this on tape.
I was a bit mystified at first. To my way of thinking, this kind of information is a gold mine, and I suddenly began to wonder if perhaps I myself am TOO wedded to getting into the nitty-gritty, that maybe if I had some human decency I would react more the way Amber did. These thoughts did not last long, however, and I said to Amber that she should not see this as a bad thing at all, that likely the poor woman simply had no one to talk to, that crying or not she had decided to tell Amber all this, that is was her free choice, etc. I said that she should not feel like a bad person because she was hearing all of this in her capacity as an anthropologist.
Amber's reaction did point up some valuable issues anthropologists should be concerned about. I told her that there were issues here to be concerned about and keep in mind. One is that it is unusual for someone to act this way, that the woman may be a bit unbalanced, or, more to the point, she may be developing an attachment to Amber that needs to be attended to. Interviewing people about personal topics is touchy business in any situation, and the potential problems are compounded by the heavy symbolic significance an "American" has around here. I was thinking of my experience in PNG, which I have written about, when one of my interviewees stormed my house one morning because he had seen my disembodied head, glasses and all, staring and him and laughing at him in the bush the night before. He was quite angry and even demanded that I leave the village immediately (he accused me of actually being an "Australian"--a real insult). In my usual way, it was not long before I had my tape recorder out even in this tense situation, and in the end the two of us had a long reflective conversation about his troubling visions. It all worked out fine, but it might not have.
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OUR RECREATION FLOP
We had this conversation on our way up into the interior for a hike to a waterfall for group recreation. I had arranged with a guy named Waqa, who was trying to set up a new resort, to do his "thing" on us as a group. I agreed to pay his standard fee, some US$10 per person, for this. He told me he wanted to do his standard thing so we could critique him later and so we could take pictures for his future brochure. It all seemed pretty harmless to me at the time, but a little forethought would have told me this was not what we needed.
When we arrived I had my first misgivings immediately, as he had assembled a group of family members all dressed in leaves and flowers, with an old battered guitar. They immediately erupted into song and proffered leis for each of us, welcoming us formally to their place. We were escorted up to a makeshift shelter where we had to sit down and observe a yaqona ceremony with some perfunctory explanations. We ourselves have had yaqona ceremonies out our ears at this point, and the students, while polite yaqona drinkers, don't particularly care for the taste. The worst of it was that we had to sit around and make small talk instead of hiking. After the yaqona we were asked to sit while they performed several meke songs, and at this point Waqa announced that we were in for a real treat because one of the members of the group had been a musician as a young man and had traveled to Hawaii and met Elvis Presley there. I suddenly felt for the guy, standing there in his silly tourist getup, after having been rounded up by Waqa because of his connections in the distant past.
Anyway, they danced for us after Waqa welcomed us formally, reading from crib notes and sounding rather stilted. After that, it was up to the waterfall. The hike was short, about fifteen minutes, and the waterfall was indeed very beautiful. Waqa spent the whole time exhorting us to take picture after picture, and he especially wanted shots of Jeffrey cavorting in a small pool nearby. The students, for their part, quickly decided to walk to the top of the waterfall, and they spent the next hour sitting up there, talking amongst themselves. I suspected that with there being several people around, some of them older men, there was no way the students would actually decide to take a swim, and who could blame them. Sensing that there would be no swimming at all if I didn't do something, I got undressed and dove in myself. It was extremely refreshing, with some fifteen feet of cool water, and the pleasant pull of the current. I started joking around with one of the young guys--he had claimed to have touched the bottom, so I decided to give it a try. I dove in straight down, pushed out on my ears, and made a go of it. I got there and picked up a stone as a trophy. Everyone thought this was great, and now he felt pressured to do the same, which he did. I couldn't help noticing, though, that he had purposely headed for one end of the pool, where it was likely a bit more shallow.
Meanwhile, Waqa was showing concern that none of the women wanted to swim. At this point I was already feeling bothered by him, and I of course suspected ulterior motives--he wanted to be sure to have pictures for his brochure. I climbed up to talk to the students and they verified that there was no way they were going to swim with Waqa wanting pictures snapped. They were beginning to feel quite put out about being props for his planned advertising campaign.
Eventually we walked back, and then it was over to his village for a tour and then yet another yaqona ceremony at the local school with the teachers there. We felt carted around from stop to stop, and by afternoon Debbie was really not feeling well, so she slept in a village house while we went to the school. We got a perfunctory tour of the grounds, did our yaqona, and then begged to be let go.
I joked with the students on the way back that they should now have some real insight into what Lady Diana must have spent her life going through--ceremony after ceremony, sitting around and waiting, snapping pictures, with people wanting her presence just for what she stood for rather than for who she was. The students were all polite, but I could tell this was not exactly what they had needed on this day. What they needed was a break from being on show, not a more intensified version of it! The next morning at our class meeting I apologized to them, and they were gracious about it.
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HIKE TO "THE ROCK" OF VITAWA
That afternoon, though, we got a treat, a taste of the real thing. Debbie had arranged with her village to take us up a very distinctive hill just outside Vitawa, her village (it is some kind of volcanic plug and the guide books say there was once a fortification at the top). We backpacked Jeffrey, and we were accompanied by a troupe of delightful kids and a couple of Debbie's "sisters," one of whom had never been up the hill before. It was a tough scramble, without much of a path, but the view from the top was absolutely spectacular! We could see the whole coast, in both directions, cane fields, the highway, garden plots, and the whole of Debbie's village Vitawa, tucked up against the coastline, with prominent church in the middle. THIS was what the doctor ordered! Unfortunately, as luck would have it, my camera jammed in the middle of rewinding a roll, and I stupidly opened the back thinking I could just add a new roll to replace this one. Then of course, the new roll would not load. So there I was, on the top of this hill, with ruined roll and no way to take more slides. Mine wasn't the only camera there, but it was the only one with slide film. I read in the manual later that the jam was caused by a rundown battery and that I should have simply replaced the battery WITHOUT opening the back and extracting the film first!
In addition to the view, there were remnants of shellfish all over the place, and the young women who escorted us there told us that this was the "garbage" of the people who had once lived at the top of this rock. It was hard to see how very many people could manage living there considering how little room there was, but it is hard to come up with any other explanation for all the pieces of shells and whatnot. Anyway, it was a splendid trip overall.
We were all invited to a barbecue at Cakacaka's afterwards, and I had to settle myself down to more yaqona and listening to conversations in Fijian, picking up no more than a word here and there. It was great food, though, lamb chops marinated in garlic and soy sauce and barbecued on an open fire. I ate a lot. The students and Karen, as women, fared a bit better as all the women retired inside to watch Party of Five on the TV. It seems to be the women's role at gatherings like this to work hard at making the food and then to sit around waiting while the men do their socializing thing over yaqona. The TV helps.
I ferried the students home and reflected on a great day. We had had a very good seminar in the morning, with their showing genuine interest in their field projects (we were discussing economics) and then a great hike in the afternoon, good food and some genuine friendship from Cakacaka. I had told him about Waqa (who is related to Cakacaka) and he reiterated that Waqa was self-centered and was going about this tourism thing all wrong. You have to sense your guests' needs and cater to them.
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